HPE has shrunk so much it's abandoning its iconic Palo Alto campus to move in with a company it acquired

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Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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  • Two years after the breaking up of Hewlett-Packard Co, Hewlett Packard Enterprise is selling its headquarters in Palo Alto, California.
  • After years of layoffs and restructuring, the company will consolidate some of its Silicon Valley offices. 
  • HPE will move its headquarters to the HPE Aruba office in Santa Clara. The office was recently built to house the team at Aruba, which was acquired by HPE in 2015.

After two years of massive restructuring and staff reductions, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is selling its headquarters on land it has leased in Palo Alto, California since 1957, the company announced on Thursday.

The headquarters will move to nearby Santa Clara, at a new 230,000 square-foot office complex originally built to house Aruba, a company acquired by HPE in 2015. Some of the staff will also move to existing offices in San Jose and Milpitas. 

HPE wouldn't disclose how many people work in Silicon Valley, but the company has around 45,000 employees globally.

“Over the past two years we’ve made tremendous progress towards becoming a simpler, nimbler and more focused company,” said Meg Whitman, CEO of HPE, said in a statement. “I’m excited to move our headquarters to an innovative new building that provides a next-generation digital experience for our employees, customers and partners. Our new building will better reflect who HPE is today and where we are heading in the future.” 

A home of 60 years

The move follows the 2015 break-up of Hewlett-Packard Co into two separate companies: HPE, which focuses on selling technology to businesses, and HP Inc, which makes printers and desktop computers.

Both companies have remained at the Stanford Research Park property, which HP Co first moved onto sixty years ago, since the split. But HPE has worked out of separate offices that were built on a portion of the land in 1979. HPE will sell those buildings, while HP Inc will remain where it is.

Since becoming an independent organization, HPE has shrunk by divesting its technology services unit and signing a deal to sell its software division.

The reorganization has already involved several rounds of layoffs, including a major restructuring in June 2016, which saw the departure of numerous company veterans and the consolidation of its sales organization.

In September, Bloomberg reported that HPE would lay off around 5,000 people — 10% of its global workforce — before the end of the year. 

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Becky Peterson was formerly a tech features correspondent focused on long-form profiles and investigations into the most interesting people and companies at the intersection of technology and finance.She's broken news on major tech stories including Palantir's work on Project Maven, Peter Thiel's $18 million estate in Miami (which was once featured on MTV's 'The Real World'), Jeffrey Epstein's tour of SpaceX, and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi's insistence that employees take "the D."Previously, she covered enterprise tech and tech investment banking with a focus on M&A, IPO and venture capital deals in San Francisco. She graduated from New York University with a master's degree in media, culture and communication with an emphasis on technology and society. ExpertiseSilicon Valley, Venture Capital, Investment Banking, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine MaxwellPopular articlesInside the turmoil at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where employees say divorce, Epstein, and vaccines have left some staffers polishing their résumésThe secret life of Ian Osborne, the shadowy 38-year-old cofounder of Chamath Palihapitiya's SPAC who has built the ultimate black book of billionairesSilicon Valley VCs are at war with the 'far left radicals' running CaliforniaInside the life of Ghislaine Maxwell's secret husband, a once-high-flying tech entrepreneur backed by Eric Schmidt who is now a central figure in one of the country's most high-profile legal casesRent the Runway CEO Jennifer Hyman, one of the most successful female founders, is fighting to save her companyJeffrey Epstein set Elon Musk's brother up with a girlfriend in effort to get close to the Tesla founder, sources sayA drunken late-night assault allegation has roiled the secretive world of Mark Zuckerberg's private family office. Personal aides are speaking out about claims that household staff endured sexual harassment and racism from their colleagues.